He had my full attention.
“She? Did she say why?”
“I didn’t ask. It was bad enough that I replied by asking her if it was a joke. It caught me so off guard, I messed up.” He dropped his face into his palms as his elbows rested on his knees. That said something, because Facet didn’t make mistakes.
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either. It really fucked with my head. She goes by the name Scarlett O’Hara, but that’s not her real name, obviously. We were friends—or as much as two anonymous people can be on the web. I looked at her as a protégé, of sorts. Like I said, pretty much everything she knows is because of me. When we first met, she was fucking around in shit she had no business in, and I stopped her. We started talking. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why it started. Normally, I wouldn’t bother to teach people what I know, because who wants to give away their knowledge? You know?”
“Then why did you? She could’ve been someone trying to get into your shit.”
He scoffed. “I said I taught her everythingsheknew, not whatIknow. Trust me when I say I had the upper hand. She was truly harmless. A vagabond with no real home, originally born in California—or so I thought.”
“Meaning?” I asked as unease grew and churned in my guts.
“Whoever created her backstory was good. There wasn’t anything to raise eyebrows that it wasn’t accurate. Everything checked out, and I didn’t discuss my personal work with her. I truly saw no threat.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Until she asked about me.”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been talking to her for almost ten years—since I was still in the military. I didn’t even know you then. Plus, you’ve been here for much less than that. She obviously didn’t befriend me to get info on you, so why now?”
“That’s a good question. I’m assuming you know who and where she is?”
“Yeah. She moved to Des Moines about six months ago, but I didn’t know. Never really had a reason to keep tabs on her every move. I would simply check on where she was occasionally. You know, make sure she was okay.”
Alarm bells were ringing in my head, drowning out the pounding of earlier. It was as if I knew what he was going to say before the words left his mouth.
“Her name is Laila King, or it is now.”
The roar of a freight train began to fill the room.
“When she asked about you, I thought maybe you had met her at Royal Ink when you stopped by to see Chains. I mean she’s a piercer, and I found out she put in an application there, but we didn’t have an opening. It wasn’t a far stretch. It was possible she had the hots for you.” He shrugged. “But something didn’t seem right. Call it a gut feeling, but things weren’t making sense. After a lot of digging, and I mean alot,in some very deep places I shouldn’t have been,I found something interesting. Her name used to be Lila Kellerman before she went into witness protection.”
I slid off the edge of the bed to the floor and gripped my hair as I curled into myself and the past swallowed me with a vengeance. I didn’t hear Facet if he was talking to me, nor could I have said when he left the room.
The sound of the gavel banging drew my attention from my introspection.
“All in favor of taking on this job?”
Everyone pretty much voted yes. The ayes had it. Honestly, I didn’t know what the exact job was, but I was fine with whatever the majority wanted. My mind couldn’t process much more at that time. The Khatri Corporation was run by Rudra Khatri and his brothers. They owned several porn productions companies, and our chapter in New York City had actually done business with them at one time. What most people didn’t know was that they also operated a high-class prostitution service too.
“Then Facet will start searching for the breach in the Khatri Corporation accounts, and we go from there.” Venom’s gavel hit the table again, and we were done. Several of the brothers hung around bullshitting. I had somewhere to be, so as soon as church wrapped up, I was on my feet.
“Ghost? A word,” Venom said from the head of the table where he and Raptor still sat.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Do you wanna tell me why Facet was looking into Laila King for you?” Venom asked as he crossed his inked arms and leaned back in his seat. He didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t poised to jump out of his seat at me, so that was good. I took a deep breath.
“She’s a girl I met at the grocery store,” I said, shrugging it off. I could tell by his expression that he knew there was more to it than that. He and Raptor stared, and I fought fidgeting like a grade-school kid in front of the principal.
“Okay,” he finally said. “But run it past me first next time. Yeah?”
The lump in my throat made it hard to swallow around it, but I did and nodded.
“You can go,” he said.
Happily.